May 10, 2022
Caregiving as liturgy and habit
Months ago, a friend gave me a copy Every Moment Holy, Volume II: Death, Grief, and Hope. She had just recently lost one of her parents, and in her note which she tucked inside, she wrote, “This book of prayers and liturgy has really opened our hearts to one another and to our comforter; the Lord has used this book to help us heal.”
It certainly wasn’t part of my church tradition growing up to pray formal, scripted prayers; we didn’t even have the regular habit of praying the Lord’s Prayer. There was always this nervousness in our Baptist circles that anything that became too habitual would become too rote.
I suppose those fears have merit, given how many people have grown up sitting and kneeling, standing and reciting words in church that effectively have had little personal meaning. Still, another part of me can’t help but feel the burden of spiritual extemporaneity. If all the words I am to pray must be my own original words, what happens when the well of my own words runs dry?
How do I pray when I don’t know what to say?
This volume of Every Moment Holy, which my friend gifted to me, offers beautiful prayers for all kinds of dark and uncertain moments like these. The last couple of days, I’ve camped out on the pages that offer “A Liturgy for Long-Term Caregivers.” As I’ve mentioned here (and wrote about recently for Christianity Today), we’re moving back to the States to provide more practical support to our aging parents. I don’t know what this new caregiving season might look like, but I am quite sure that I don’t have the inner resources for what it will require.
This morning, I copied a paragraph from “A Liturgy for Long-Term Caregivers” into my journal. Later today, I will copy it on a post-it note and stick it on the wall of my office:
“O Father, let me love well this one who suffers. Let me again and again choose love in each moment, so that through every small act of care and mercy the practice of love becomes a liturgy and a habit by which you are forming in me a compassion that cannot be learned any other way, save by the giving of myself in long service to another.”
You’ll know I was immediately taken with the image of caregiving as a liturgy and a habit. But maybe you keep wondering: why do I find the language of habit so hopeful? I suppose it reminds me that the only heroism to which I’m called is small, ordinary, and daily. Habit is a call to keep showing up to my life: its God-breathed invitations and responsibilities. Habit doesn’t suggest I have to do big things or make big change. In fact, habit reminds me that I can fail along the way. Because habit is never once and done.
Habit is renewed daily—just like the mercies of God.
Caregiving will be a new habit for me, and I know enough to know that new habits are hard. Time has to be given to form new habits. Will must be galvanized for the small, incremental changes that new habits impose on our life. What is familiar is always easiest, no matter how broken and malfunctioning we know those ruts to be.
I believe habit sits at the very center of the tension of the spiritual life, which Paul captures in Philippians 2: “God is at work in you to will and to work for his good pleasure.” Let’s never mistake that God is always the first mover in our lives. He calls—and we answer. Granting this, we can see that habit is not meant to be powered by our own energies alone. Rather, habit can be considered a response to, a cooperation with, even a participation in grace. It is never done alone—but rightly, it is something done.
Whatever you have to do today that feels difficult, that seems beyond your own capacities, consider the habits involved in saying yes—and ask God to work his energy in you.
Yours,
Jen